moblog Blog

The first thing ever bought and sold across the Internet was a bag of marijuana. In 1971 or 1972, students at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory used ARPANET—the earliest iteration of the Internet—to arrange a marijuana deal with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The drug revolution that no one can stop — The Matter Archive — Medium (View on gamamb.tumblr.com)

International law prohibits the granting of immunities to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture. This applies not only to the actual perpetrators but also to those senior officials within the US Government who devised, planned and authorised these crimes. […] It is no defence for a public official to claim that they were acting on superior orders. CIA officers who physically committed acts of torture therefore bear individual criminal responsibility for their conduct, and cannot hide behind the authorisation they were given by their superiors. However, the heaviest penalties should be reserved for those most seriously implicated...

If you want to boil it down, the most important bit I think of how companies and organizations work to be innovative is that they are great places to have conversations. If you see lots of people coming together, often informally, without necessarily a pre-programmed agenda, those places are likely to be innovative. Charles Leadbeater, Independent and Strategic Adviser on Innovation: The Frugal Innovator – Solutions for the 21st Century (View on gamamb.tumblr.com)

Current security efforts suffer from the flawed assumption that adequate security can be provided in applications with the existing security mechanisms of mainstream operating systems. S. Jeff Turner, John F. Farrell: The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments (National Security Agency) (View on gamamb.tumblr.com)

Codenamed AURORAGOLD, the covert operation has monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than 1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks. Operation AURORAGOLD: How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide (View on gamamb.tumblr.com)

aynes argues that before this recent emergence of consciousness, humanity experienced the world in a manner similar to the Borg. There was not a holistic self with free will, but rather a two-part psyche, or “bicameral mind,” in which one part gave “orders” to a second part that acted on those orders. For bicameral humans, “volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey.” Jaynes says these commands were often perceived as coming from gods, and that they...